PUT out the flags! After eighteen months of duds, the Royal Court, the country’s premier new writing theatre, has found an excellent play for its main stage in Martin McDonagh’s Hangmen.

The time is 1965, and two years after his bungled execution of Hennessey, a convicted murderer who went to his death protesting his innocence, Harry Wade, a Lancashire publican and part-time hangman, is pondering life after Parliament’s abolition of capital punishment.

As he pulls pints for four barroom regulars, Harry is visited by Mooney, a mysterious Londoner, whose suspected role in his daughter’s disappearance gives him an unorthodox opportunity to exercise his craft.

Although it’s hard to detect any deeper purpose to McDonagh’s writing than putting a comic twist on the North-South divide and his debt to his two dramatic progenitors, Orton and Pinter, is conspicuously heavy, Hangmen is a highly engaging blend of quirky characters, gallows humour and farcical situations, couched in consummate dialogue.

David Morrissey is splendid as Harry, a nit-picking martinet thwarted by the arrival of his lifelong rival, the chief hangman, Albert Pierrepoint (an effortlessly commanding John Hodgkinson), and Johnny Flynn exudes malignant charm as Mooney.

The comic invention in Mr Foote’s Other Leg is much coarser. In adapting his fine biography of the scandalous eighteenth century actor-manager, Samuel Foote, who lost a leg but won a royal patent in a ducal wager, Ian Kelly has produced a kind of Horrible Theatrical Historie.

The play is an enjoyable romp, a mixture of rich period detail and crude anachronism, in which anyone who was anyone in Foote’s world (and some who weren’t) is cited.

It is, however, formless, overlong and marred by a superfluous subplot in which Benjamin Franklin, on a diplomatic mission to London, investigates magnetism and memory.

PH

As Foote who offended propriety both on and off stage, Simon Russell Beale indulges all his most egregious mannerisms: simpering, smirking, leering, rolling his eyes and drawling his vowels, in a performance that is part Little Lord Fauntleroy and part Widow Twankey.

Fortunately, Richard Eyre’s production contains superior work from Joseph Millson and Dervla Kirwan as Foote’s fellow actors, David Garrick and Peg Woffington, Micah Balfour and Jenny Galloway as his longsuffering servants, and Kelly himself as the young George III, here a witness to madness in others.

VERDICT: 3/5

PH

This week’s classical opening is a hugely welcome revival of T S Eliot’s verse drama, The Cocktail Party. This fascinating, if not wholly successful, play brings Eliot’s singular fusion of metaphysical speculation and psychological insight into the world of drawing-room comedy.

It links the women ‘talking of Michelangelo’ from his Lovesong of J Alfred Prufrock with the mystery and grandeur of his Four Quartets.

VERDICT: 4/5

While not overtly metrical, Eliot’s dialogue has a richness and a rhythm far beyond that of ordinary theatrical speech and both requires and repays deep concentration. Abbey Wright’s production treads the delicate balance between naturalism and formality that the play demands.

Some of the younger actors have problems with projection, but there is sterling work from the three veterans, Hilton McRae, Christopher Ravenscroft and, above all, the wonderfully chirrupy Marcia Warren.